Got some interesting responses to the “what’s wrong with blueprint” post. Strange that people are only speaking up now after I ask and not on their own accord. Oh well. Feedback is feedback. From the issues brought up I see that this will help make the next version that much better so I thank everyone for their input (and keep it coming, I may not respond to everyone but I’ll certainly read them!).

Here’s a breakdown of the major concerns/questions:

blueprint crashing

Yes, this is a problem with any software where I don’t have a dedicated team of internet monkeys banging away at it in testing. In all honesty, I thought it was more stable than people say because I don’t seem to have it crash when I’m testing and building things with it. Of course that’s a little biased, since I know how it works and just go through the motions in the right order. So part of this education and knowledge and the other is compatibility with systems (ATI cards rearing their ugly head again here). In any case, we’ll try to make bp2.0 as stable as possible and it certainly will be less crash-prone than it’s predecessor.

Objects created with blueprint not as good as ones made with PhotoShop/3D Studio

Well first off, you didn’t pay $1000+ for blueprint. Okay, lame excuse I know and I shouldn’t hide behind the commercial aspect of things but in all reality, I’m just one guy with a little time on his hands. Adobe and Kinetix (or whoever owns 3DS now) have dozens if not hundreds of people working on the system full time. So I really wish people would stop making this comparision because it’s like apples and concrete. In any case, I continue to try to enhance the look of the objects made with blueprint and with external hooks into 3rd party renderers like POV-Ray and RenderMan on the way, it may get there yet. If you really don’t like the quality of the blueprint output then you’re welcome to use 3D Studio, Truespace or any 3D program that can give you that quality and just use blueprint as a buffer. A little more onus on your part but it works.

More advanced features in 3D editing needed to make objects look better

These are underway but one of the opposed things that people say is that blueprint is too complicated. So I’m stuck between a rock and a hard place. How do you program an application that is simple to use yet offers powerful 3D tools like open splines, bezier curves, nurbs surfaces and all that good stuff? Hey, if you have the answer I’m all for it and will gladly change the shape of the program. It’s difficult to maintain that balance but I think I did a pretty good job. Your mileage may vary.

More tutorials (or how do I use this stupid thing)

Absolutely and I’m to blame for this. The various people I’ve had offer to write tutorials in the past just didn’t deliver. I have a new group that is willing and ready to go and I’m just organizing that effort now so we should be there soon little grasshoppers.

Textures don’t look good and ones from the blueprint site don’t work

A big oops on my part. The original texturing that went into the alpha release and the end of last year (or maybe it was early this year) was completely redone and well, I just didn’t have time to take into consideration everything. This is absolutely fixed in the new release and you can really do some nice things with textures and materials. This will also offset the “blueprint objects look like shit” comments from above (but not solve the problem completely).

Selecting a base object doesn’t show up in the program

And it never will. This is a common misunderstanding with blueprint that no matter how many times or ways I explain (or others explain) people just don’t get it. The “objects” in the Sim files now are just 2D bitmaps, images. There is no 3D information and there never will be (well, maybe with Sims 2 someday). So when you select a base object you can’t build a 3D object over top of it because there’s nothing to build on. However, I am adding a feature to blue 2 where when you select a base object, you can optionally display the sprite image in the 3D viewport (because there are no views of it in the other angles) as a backdrop. I’ll post a screenshot of this feature and perhaps it will help with positioning objects. I’m just fiddling with the sizing to get it correct. IMO this would make things more complicated as having a full 2D image of something on the screen when you’re trying to build a 3D object over it might be difficult to digest. The template object support that’s been added will help with positioning and sizing as well so hopefully this issue should go away.

Which way is the object facing?

Yeah, you got me. Seriously though I’m bad with directions with blueprint. I’ve fixed this for the next version so you should be good to go.

Creating objects with mulitple frames is difficult

I know eh? What’s up with that. Yes, multiple frames is just plain weird in blueprint and while you can create T.Vs and such, it’s just a bugger to organize. This has been fixed in version 2 with animation frames.

Object values like bladder, etc. can’t be edited with blueprint but can with T-Mog

Another myth. Yes they can be edited in T-Mog but they don’t do anything. They just show up in the catalog like this. Both T-Mog and blueprint suffer from not being able to change the actual tuning values here. So far only Edith can do this (and even then it’s a chore to do and not very clear where to do it from) however the hope is to get blueprint to do this. We’re pretty close and getting closer with reality soon.

Grouping flips the object and messes it up

Software bug. Plain and simple. I just screwed up when writing that code and probably had way too many coffees or something that night. ‘Tis fixed.

Multi-tile support!

Yes yes and yes. I know, this is something important and has been ongoing for sometime now. Why? Because in order to slice the image correctly you need to do raycasting in 3D to figure which pixel lies in what tile. Since there’s no raycasting support in blueprint, this is rather difficult (read: almost impossible). I’ve tried various ways around it and again, this is something that’s getting closer by the minute but will be a way off. The most interesting thing about this comment is that people say they use their 3D package and T-Mog to do multi-tile objects. Well, personally I haven’t seen any new multi-tile objects (except for rugs and such) out there. These are the same people that say they’re too lazy to learn blueprint yet will take (what seems like a lot of work to me) to build a multi-tile object with T-Mog.

In any case, hope that clears up somethings and gives you a warm gushy feeling about the direction blueprint is taking and what’s going on with it. Thanks for the feedback! (whew, long post huh?)